Letters from a Citizen of the World to His Friends in the East. In WASHINGTON IRVING (ed.), The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, pp. 263-264

pdf version

From Lien Chi Altangi, to
Fum Hoam, first president of the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin, in
China. The better sort here pretend to the utmost compassion for
animals of every kind: to hear them speak, a stranger would be apt
to imagine they could hardly hurt the gnat that stung them; they
seem so tender and so full of pity, that one would take them for
the harmless friends of the whole creation; the protectors of the
meanest insect or reptile that was privileged with existence. And
yet (would you believe it?) I have seen the very men who have thus
boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh
of six different animals tossed up in a fricassee. Strange
contrariety of conduct! They pity, and they eat the objects of
their compassion! The lion roars with terror over its captive; the
tiger sends forth its hideous shriek to intimidate its prey; no
creature shows any fondness for its short-lived prisoner, except a
man and a cat.

Man was born to live with
innocence and simplicity, but he has deviated from nature; he was
born to share the bounties of heaven, but he has monopolized them;
he was born to govern the brute creation, but he is become their
tyrant. If an epicure now shall happen to surfeit on his last
night's feast, twenty animals the next day are to undergo the most
exquisite tortures, in order to provoke his appetite to another
guilty meal. Hail, O ye simple, honest brahmins of the East; ye
inoffensive friends of all that were born to happiness as well as
you; you never sought a short-lived pleasure from the miseries of
other creatures! You never studied the tormenting arts of
ingenious refinement; you never surfeited upon a guilty meal! How
much more purified and refined are your sensations than ours! You
distinguish every element with the utmost precision; a stream
untasted before is new luxury, a change of air is a new banquet,
too refined for Western imaginations to conceive. Though the
Europeans do not hold the transmigration of souls, yet one of
their doctors has, with great force of argument, and great
plausibility of reasoning, endeavoured to prove, that the bodies
of animals are the habitations of demons and wicked spirits, which
are obliged to reside in these prisons till the resurrection
pronounces their everlasting punishment; but are previously
condemned to suffer all the pains and hardships inflicted upon
them by man, or by each other, here. If this be the case, it may
frequently happen, that while we whip pigs to death, or boil live
lobsters, we are putting some old acquaintance, some near
relation, to excruciating tortures, and are serving him up to the
very table where he was once the most welcome companion.

"Kabul," says the
Zendevesta, "was born on the rushy banks of the river Mawra; his
possessions were great, and his luxuries kept pace with the
affluence of his fortune; he hated the harmless brahmins, and
despised their holy religion; every day his table was decked out
with the flesh of a hundred different animals, and his cooks had a
hundred different ways of dressing it, to solicit even satiety.

"Notwithstanding all his
eating, he did not arrive at old age; he died of a surfeit, caused
by intemperance: upon this, his soul was carried off, in order to
take its trial before a select assembly of the souls of those
animals which his gluttony had caused to be slain, and who were
now appointed his judges.

"He trembled before a
tribunal, to every member of which he had formerly acted as an
unmerciful tyrant; he sought for pity, but found none disposed to
grant it. Does he not remember, cries the angry boar, to what
agonies I was put, not to satisfy his hunger, but his vanity? I
was first hunted to death, and my flesh scarce thought worthy of
coming once to his table. Were my advice followed, he should do
penance in the shape of a hog, which in life he most resembled.

"I am rather, cries a
sheep upon the bench, for having him suffer under the appearance
of a lamb; we may then send him through four or five
transmigrations in the space of a month. Were my voice of any
weight in the assembly, cries a calf, he should rather assume such
a form as mine; I was bled every day, in order to make my flesh
white, and at last killed without mercy. Would it not be wiser,
cries a hen, to cram him in the shape of a fowl, and then smother
him in his own blood, as I was served? The majority of the
assembly were pleased with this punishment, and were going to
condemn him without further delay, when the ox rose up to give his
opinion: I am informed, says this counsellor, that the prisoner at
the bar has left a wife with child behind him. By my knowledge in
divination, I foresee that this child will be a son, decrepit,
feeble, sick, a plague to himself, and all about him. What say
you, then, my companions, if we condemn the father to animate the
body of his own son; and by this means make him feel in himself
those miseries his intemperance must otherwise have entailed upon
his posterity? The whole court applauded the ingenuity of his
torture; they thanked him for his advice. Kabul was driven once
more to revisit the earth; and his soul in the body of his own
son, passed a period of thirty years, loaded with misery, anxiety,
and disease."